Page 65 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

T ory holds on . Sena’s forehead tips onto his shoulder. His hands hang at his sides, lit awful red with each pulse of the emergency strips.

The wall he leaned on—clinical white and gray and powder blue—is slashed through with a dark stain.

“Sena?”

Quiet, steady, something drips to the floor. A blackish trail marks Sena’s passage through the hall behind him. Tory’s hands jump to Sena’s shoulders, then his back, and come away wet. “ Sena .”

No answer. No sound. No reassuring breath against his shoulder where Sena’s hair tickles at his nape. Tory presses two fingers to the artery at his neck.

This is what a heart feels like before it fades: a thready, shivering pulse.

Another, off-rhythm—

Then nothing.

Sena’s weight against him is at once too little and impossibly heavy. Tory wraps his arms all the way around and forces his aching knees to lift them both. Smoke turns the dim hallway to a tunnel of red.

“I’ve got you,” he says, too late. “I’ve got you. I’m right here.”

He tugs one of Sena’s arms around his back. Sena supported him like this on the way to the infirmary, back when he feared touch and Tory still mostly loathed him.

“You can’t do this. You told me—” He told Tory about that stupid tree. The plaque the tree swallowed, the roots that chipped away at solid stone, a story where just living was a triumph. Tory says, “We’re almost out, okay? Ugly as anything, this place. This is a terrible place to—to . . .”

And, “You really are the worst at self-preservation, I can’t keep pulling your ass out of the fire.”

And, “Sena, please.”

No answer. Sena’s blood soaks into his clothes.

He gets three rooms away from the typing and registration lab before he can’t navigate the rubble with Sena’s dead weight.

He lets Sena down on the filthy floor on his back.

This can’t be right. Sena was talking to him a second ago.

Tory presses his fingers against Sena’s wrist, against his neck, hard enough to bruise living flesh. No pulse.

“No, no, fuck—” Helplessness crushes the air from his lungs.

His hands press against Sena’s still chest. He can’t bear this, not again, and he’s useless, can’t even heal—

He reaches out, instinctively, like he did in Riese’s wagon on the way back from the battlefield, ready to run up against that impossible barrier.

He runs up against nothing, and it’s so much worse.

Helner said traditional Healers can’t heal the dead because there’s nothing to amplify.

It was an easy thing to know in theory. In practice, it’s unspeakable.

All of Sena’s vast, wild energy is gone, nothing Tory can expand over miles or try and fail to collapse.

There’s no reservoir in him that a Healer could take and mend him with.

Adrenaline sears through Tory, because that’s not all Helner said.

Tory, after all, is not a Healer.

He doesn’t need Sena’s energy. He can channel his own.

Restoration , Iri called it. Time. The one thing Sena never had enough of. Tory can give it back to him.

He reaches out, the unpleasant shift of time flowing in a direction it wasn’t meant to hitting him like a slap, as always.

Tory shudders at the assault of information it reveals.

Sena’s body is broken, bruised, poisoned—everywhere.

This is not just fever, nothing as simple as a broken bone.

Restoring Kelly enough to allow the possibility of survival left Tory immobile for days.

Doing this will kill him.

In the smoky dimness, Tory laughs. He waits for the clawed clench of fear his mother created in him.

For so long, he’s tied himself up in knots just to survive.

To die here would be meaningless. Tory’s not a fool.

The fear’s there, but on the other side of the chasm it carves in his chest is a solid place, unshakable.

Some things matter more than survival. Sena said it back then, before Tory was ready to understand. This is one of those things.

Sena is one of those things. Sena who told him about kuhlu, who loves the sad stories, who looked like a child, so bright with joy after he made something grow.

Tory spent so many years trying to follow his mother’s advice, but all this time, he should’ve followed her example instead.

It’s not a bad feeling, not really, to love someone to the point of ruin.

Because this feeling is love, one of a thousand shades.

There’s a love that would give itself away on a battlefield, a love that would die to offer a child a chance at freedom.

A sharp-edged, clumsy love that would have stolen the Madam’s earrings and bled to pick those damn tree berries back in Hulven.

A love like in the story Sena told him, habitual and hungry, reaching for the stars.

And this , sunshine-bright—deep-rooted and wrenching, woven through him so well it might tear him apart when it goes.

Tory’s lungs sit like stones in him. His traitorous heart pounds in his chest.

His healing, since he discovered it, has always been a tool, a way to ensure acceptance and silence. He’s never needed so badly for it to work.

He’ll die to fix this. He will. And it’s fine.

Tory lets himself go. He closes the gunshot wound first, in through Sena’s lower back and out through his gut in the front.

His blood, when Tory presses his hands to the sodden cloth of his shirt, has grown tacky and lukewarm, but the flesh and viscera respond like an extension of Tory’s body, knitting together as he urges them to remember what it was like to be whole.

“You’re gonna be fine,” he murmurs, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a promise or a lie. He works because he can’t imagine making any other choice.

He’s freezing when he finishes with the wound. Tory clenches his teeth to keep them from chattering and reaches out to identify more damage. It washes over him faster than he can process it.

Blood clots. Dying tissue. Failing organs. Overtaxed lungs filling with fluid.

Broken ribs. Sena said there was maybe one. There are three.

Tory experiences the shift in the body after death—the slow fade of every flavor of energy that fuels a mind, body, and soul. In Hulven, he would have given it up for lost.

Tory opens himself up, feeds everything he has into the boy on the ground. His breath comes slow and hitches in his chest. His fingers go cold. His vision fragments and fades.

He works in reverse. Cleans poisoned blood. Restores ruined lungs. Renews dead tissue. Seals broken bones.

Pushes—with the last energy he has to spare—that still heart to beat again.

He isn’t finished with Sena. They’ve barely begun.

Sena’s heart stutters, but it’s not enough. Tory’s numb hands betray him. His vision blinks out. This last damnable wall, the barrier between life and death, refuses him passage.

He sinks, against his will, into something deep.

*

He rises from it in a panic, choking until he tastes smoke.

His eyes flick open to a barred darkness lit ocean-blue, wobbling and unreal. There’s noise all around. The ground shakes. The air reeks of fire and blood, and Tory is on his side in the dirt amidst the chaos.

“You’re back,” says a dry voice next to him. “You’re lucky they went back in to find you before you killed yourself.”

Helner . Tory grimaces. Reason returns slower than everything else, but an overwhelming sense of wrongness clamors at the back of his mind. Something’s wrong. Something—

“This is a fascinating development , by the way . ” Helner gestures up. “It did this as soon as we set you down.”

He can’t push words out yet, so he makes a rasping growl and trusts her to translate it.

He squints up, and the slats of light through whatever structure he’s in illuminate leaves in fresh green and long strings of bell-like flowers in vital blood-red dripping from . . . vines.

A dome of them, braided together by the hundreds and tucked protectively close around Tory and all the other Seeds.

How odd to think this is the same thing that destroyed the lab in response to Tory’s fear, that killed so many people on the battlefield. How beautiful . It’s all around him, but it doesn’t feel like a tomb or a prison. The blossoms shed the honeyed fragrance that muted the reek of fuel in Hulven.

Sena will love it.

Tory tips his head to the side, seeking him. “Told you,” he murmurs. “Told you they like me.”

There’s no response.

The horror of the why crashes into him with a weight that presses the air from his lungs.

“Sena!” he rasps. “Where . . .”

Vision blurred, he peers through a cacophony of shifting feet and finds him.

Not far away—almost close enough to touch if he could make himself move—he finds Jeffra, eyes wide and wet, on her knees over someone on the ground. “Please,” Tory says, levering himself up. He could get to her if there weren’t so many people in here. “Please.”

But she’s already leaning over Sena, hands gentle against his still chest. She looks over at Tory, stricken, and doesn’t say a word.

She doesn’t have to. Her hand on Sena’s chest goes soft and soothing, motherly.

She sucks in a breath and exhales a sob.

“Oh, Sena.” She shakes her head. The feet part for her as she moves to Tory and kneels.

“Tory, he’s already . . . There’s nothing to—” Her eyes dart to Sena.

“I can’t do anything. But maybe I can help you help him. ”

Tory forces himself upright and his vision shutters. He crawls until he’s beside Sena.

Jeffra’s hand settles warm and solid against his back, filling his cold body with warmth. Tory breathes, and breathes again. He still has work to do, but he has no idea how to do it.

The Core is still inside Sena, rotten and poisoning him—and it’s one thing Tory can’t undo.

“His Core,” Tory says. “I can’t.”

“ I can.”

Helner drops to Tory’s side, Jeffra shifting to make room for her. She looks entirely unlike herself, the intensity she wears like a second skin gone from her as she examines Sena’s still body.

Tory’s voice comes out a growl. “ You. ”

“Me,” she says. “I—when Riese asked me to ‘treat’ Sena, he phrased what I was supposed to do to him as a mercy. Maybe it was. But he didn’t deserve that. I can’t change what I did, but . . . if his Seed is gone, I can at least remove his Core.”

Tory’s muscles bunch, body charged with the need to push her as far away from Sena as he can get her. But she’s right.

“Why should I trust you?”

Her lips quirk up. “Never said you should. But I’m damn good at what I do, and I’ve never offered a freebie before. I’d suggest taking it.”

If nothing else, they can give Sena the peace of dying free from the Core.

The ground shakes. Smoke and light rush into the cocoon of vines.

The feed of warm energy from Jeffra dissipates as a cry rises up in the back. “Mom! We need you over here!”

Jeffra squeezes his shoulder. “Work to do. I’ll be back.”

“So?” Helner raises both hands. Some wild, vertiginous energy rushes into them.

“Do it.”

From everything he’s been told, the process of separating a Core from a body is an exercise in frustration.

For a living Core in living flesh, that’s probably true.

Helner reaches into Sena, though, with gentle hands.

For all the pain it caused, removing his Core is a matter of a moment.

She withdraws her cupped hands, expression complicated.

The Core she pulled from Tory was a visceral red. This one is blackish and shriveled.

“For what it’s worth, I am sorry.” She tosses the Core into the dirt. “He had more guts than all of us. You got it from here? I need to go kill something.”

“I’ve got him.”

Her hand brushes his shoulder as she passes. “Good luck.”

Tory turns his attention back to Sena. The Core may be out, but the damage it left behind isn’t gone.

He closes his eyes and sinks down, finding inflamed and infected flesh and returning it to health.

He locks his elbows to support him and shakes, body throbbing.

Whatever energy Jeffra gave him, it’s nearly gone.

He aches, burns, and it hurts because it matters.

He breathes, and that, too, aches, like he’s been holding his breath all this time.

He works, and he works, and Sena’s body is healed but his heart remains still.

Someone settles in beside him, lays a hand on his shoulder, and Jeffra’s warm energy flows through him again. He fists his hands in Sena’s shirt and keeps going. His vision doesn’t return. He navigates Sena’s veins in the dark, the roar of his own blood filling his ears.

His body is healed, but the line between here and gone remains impassable. Sena’s heart never picks up its tune.

Sometimes it tries. Weak contractions, like shivers. Blood moves through Sena only when Tory makes it.

He keeps going.

“Damn you,” he mutters to the tune of his own heart. “You don’t get to do this.”

Somewhere along the line, freedom stopped being a mere concept and became the people he shared it with. Sena doesn’t get to bow out like some motherfucking self-sacrificing idiot. That’s not how this works.

“Shh,” Jeffra murmurs, “You’re doing so well. Now this. Feel what I’m doing.” Her warm energies root around in him, and adrenaline floods his body. “Just like that, but give it everything you have.”

He does, and it floods through Sena. It’s better. The flicker of his heart is a flutter, then an irregular squeeze. Everything Jeffra gives him, he pours into Sena.

There’s life at the core of Tory and he can channel that, too. He gives it away, throwing it against that impassable wall, but it’s not enough. All his strength, and it’s not enough.

“Tory, hon, maybe it’s . . .”

Niela settles down beside him and together with Jeffra, she stokes the warmth inside him to life once more. He’s a bonfire. A bomb. Tory grabs the growing energy and pushes it into Sena, finally pushes past the wall he couldn’t break through.

Sena’s body jerks with it, and the weak shiver of his heart—stops.

“Shit, no, no—”

And beats again. A strong, deep thrum flushes blood through Sena’s body, and then another, and another.

The static energy of the Voidseed ignites again and pushes Tory out.

He chokes out a laugh and lets himself drop, ear against Sena’s chest, savoring the pulse of his living heart.

His lungs expand, skin flushed, again, with life.

Tory’s vision fades in and out again.

Tory sinks into the steady, strengthening song of Sena’s heartbeat and the ocean-blue glow of light through his closed eyelids.